Eyeball licking spreading pinkeye in Japan

Eyepatches, a new trend spawned by eyeball-licking. (Photo via band.in)

Today in the world of weird, eyeball licking’s a thing in Japan. And it’s causing crazy pinkeye outbreaks among its mostly elementary and middle school practitioners (surprise, surprise).

The practice, which is literally someone licking another person’s wide-open eyeball, has become a courting ritual on par with a good makeout sesh. Squirm. Kids call eyeball kissing “worming” or “oculolinctus,” Gawker tells us.

A Japanese teacher under the online nom de plume “Mr. Y” wrote about the unsanitary fetish on a website called Naver Matome. The post was RT’d on Twitter tens of thousands of times, probably out of a combination of disbelief and disgust. Mr. Y says he knew something was up when an epidemic of styes broke out at school, he says.

“After class one day, I went into the equipment store in the gymnasium to tidy up,” he writes, as translated by Japan Crush. “The door had been left open, and when I looked inside, a male pupil and a female pupil had their faces close together and were kind of fumbling around. Could it be bullying? I wondered, but when I had a good look, the boy was licking the girl’s eye! Surprised, I shouted ‘What are you doing? Stop it at once!’ and the two of them were so shocked they jumped apart. The girl burst into tears, and the boy just went bright red and was shaken up.”

After a little coaxing, the young couple told the teacher that eye-licking is so in right now. All the cool kids are doing it (you can see who the cool kids are by the pinkness of their eye, FYI).

But get this: full-grown adults are super into this, too. HuffoPo says it’s been around for at least a decade, as evidenced by Internet searches. One of the site’s journos even subjected his own peepers to the dangerous practice for the story’s sake, risking corneal abrasions from tongue ridges and lord only knows how big a flood of unwelcome saliva-bourne bacteria.

“It’s strange to have something touch the eye without it hurting,” Campbell reported after the eye-tonguing. “I was a receiver, not a giver. I don’t see it as a sexual thing. But you have to be comfortable with someone.”

Unsurprisingly, this cringe-inducing fetish is responsible for a spin-off trend: Eye patches.